According to Ellie Levitt, "Psychiatry chairman faces ghostwriting accusations", The Daily Pennsylvanian 12/2/2010: Recently discovered e-mails reveal that a document published in 2003 by Psychiatry Department Chairman Dwight Evans may not have been honest work. Project on Government Oversight — a nonpartisan watchdog organization that unearths corruption and promotes an ethical federal government — posted […]
In a modest way, I collect N-to-V conversions in English morphology, via zero derivation, -ize/-ise, -ify, and -ic-ate (brief discussion here). (My colleague Beth Levin has a much larger and better organized collection.) Some of these are long-established, and not particularly transparent semantically, but all of the patterns can be used to innovate verbs — […]
For those of us in the unpleasant position of policing student essays for plagiarism, there's a familiar odor wafting off of the unfolding scandal involving Scott McGinnis, a former congressman and current candidate for governor in Colorado ("McInnis’ water writings mirror works published years ago by Justice Hobbs", Denver Post 7/12/2010): Portions of essays on […]
A nice nominal-compound crash blossom was spotted by Nicholas Widdows on a BBC News web page: Missing women police find remains Like Missing comma, police decide to hire a grammarian, or Missing his mom, Joe called home? No, wait a minute, this isn't about the police missing womanly company — those first two words are […]
According to David Skinner, "Ain't that the truth", Humanities 30(4), July/August 2009: In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making. That would be \$4,623.51 per editor-year, if none […]
Let's try a little (thought) experiment in verbal short-term memory. First, find a friend. Then, find a reasonably complex sentence about 45 words long, expressing a cogent and interesting point about an important issue — say this one from a story in today's New York Times: "But the billions in new proposed American aid, officials […]
Here is one of the saddest facts about language and culture that I have noticed in quite a while: the search pattern "before turning * gun on himself" gets tens or even hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.
In the tradition of Woody Allen's "Slang Origins" (chapter 18 of his 1975 collection Without Feathers), John Kenney has written a hilarious op-ed piece for The New York Times ("The Shoe Heard Around the World", published Dec. 16, 2008), which is of course — obliquely but not quite so — about the shoes thrown at […]
Arnold's discussion of the use and misuse of the archaic English verbal endings -est and -eth calls to mind an earlier and perhaps more significant case, namely the misuse of these endings in the original text of the Book of Mormon, the fundamental sacred text of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
Rob Harrell's Big Top comic takes on word aversion: (Click on the image for a larger version.)
Errors in punctuation sometimes result in misinterpretation, but they usually don't arouse the moral outrage that plagiarism does. Some should. On June 24, 1826 Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Roger C. Weightman: May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally […]
Certain people apparently find it fascinating to read speculations about the possibility that cellphones and texting and wireless devices might be completely altering our language, and through that (in accordance with the usual vulgar Whorfianism) our thought. They will enjoy the special report on mobility in The Economist, and particularly the article entitled Homo mobilis. […]
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